simian transmission

Most of the frameworks for happiness conclude that there are four things required: perceived control, perceived progress, connectedness (meaning the depths of relationships) and being part of something bigger than yourself.

We should distinguish technology in three forms: tools, direct instructions (like blueprints and IP), and process knowledge. The third is most important: Process knowledge is hard to write down as an instruction: you can give someone a well-equipped kitchen and an extraordinarily detailed recipe, but absent cooking experience, it’s hard to make a great dish.

A lot of people think smart cities have technology at their core, but they really don't. It's kind of a mix between arts and culture. Technology is a component of it, but it's design, it's communication, collaboration, it's social programs. It's everything we think of as an intelligent city.

My goal is to build a company that is not dependent upon me and outlives me. The situation between the two companies and how my time is spent forces me immediately to create frameworks that are scalable, that are decentralised, that don’t require me being in every single detail … That is true of any organisation that scales beyond the original founding moment.

Because rideshare grew city by city at Uber, it led to an entrepreneurial team structure where each city had a General Manager (GM) who served as the de facto CEO of the city, acting like a mini-startup in the context of the larger organization. Surge pricing and driver incentives were first manually implemented by local teams with SQL queries and spreadsheets, and only later widely implemented in code by the software teams at headquarters. When I first joined Uber, each product team was also set up to be full stack, without dependencies into other teams, allowing them to build fast and iterate quickly to solve challenges. This kind of mindset — everyone’s the CEO of their own mini-startup unit — is key to fast cycles of innovation.

Everything everywhere wants you to think it’s 'building community'... But community isn’t always good. Sometimes, community is excellent and you make friends and memories and learn things about the world. Other times, community is a toxic clique whose members don’t do much except jealously police who’s in and who’s out, because they’re broken people with nothing to offer besides judgment or their own emptiness.

Building Cultures of Innovation

We plant the seeds of resilience in the ways we process negative events.  After spending decades studying how people deal with setbacks, psychologist Martin Seligman found that three P’s can stunt recovery; Personalisation - the belief that we are at fault; Pervasiveness - the belief that an event will affect all areas of our life; and Permanence - the belief that the aftershocks of the event will last forever. Recognising that negative events aren’t personal, pervasive, or permanent makes people less likely to get depressed and better able to cope.

In a way, happiness is other people. It’s the connections we build and the relationships we foster. They create us, and they continue to shape us.

“Authoritarian leaders definitely helped Taiwan, South Korea, and many Southeast Asian and Latin American countries to facilitate their economic take-offs. But China is now long past the take-off point,” he said. China was facing the “middle income trap” stage of newly industrialised economies, and to escape it meant remaining open to democracy, he said. “The correlation [so far] is 100 per cent: democratise to some extent or you don’t become a developed economy. China, under Xi Jinping, is the ultimate test case challenging this empirical historical record.”

Many debaters argue that reducing income inequality is a good idea not merely in an AI-dominated future, but also today.  Although the main argument tends to be a moral one, there's also evidence that greater equality makes democracy work better: when there's a large, well-educated middle class, the electorate is harder to manipulate, and it's tougher for small numbers of people or companies to but undue influence over the government. A better democracy can in turn enable a better-managed economy that's less corrupt, more efficient and faster growing, ultimately benefiting essentially everyone.

We all collectively see cities as about friction: good friction and bad friction... Good friction is serendipity, it’s opportunity, it’s diversity, it’s seeing 40 different nationalities on the subway as you commute in the morning. Bad friction is congestion, it’s pollution.

“Breakthrough technology results from two distinct activities that generally require different environments—invention and innovation. Invention is typically the work of scientists and researchers in laboratories, like the transistor, developed at Bell Laboratories in the 1940s. Innovation is an invention put to commercial use, like the transistor radio, sold by Texas Instruments in the 1950s. Seldom do the two activities occur successfully under the same roof. They tend to thrive in opposite conditions; while competition and consumer choice encourage innovation, invention has historically prospered in labs that are insulated from the pressure to generate profit.”

Life sucks and it’s okay. Life is great, and it’s okay. Life goes up and it’s okay; life goes down and it’s okay... If we can instill a sense of resilience in people, we mitigate suffering.”

The people we surround ourselves with either raise or lower our standards. They either help us to become the best version of ourselves or encourage us to become lesser versions of ourselves. We become like our friends. No man becomes great on his own. No woman becomes great on her own. The people around them help to make them great. We all need people in our lives who raise our standards, remind us of our essential purpose, and challenge us to become the best version of ourselves.

Writing in the 1960s and 1970s, the great urbanist Jane Jacobs was among the first to identify cities' diverse economic and social structures as the true engine of growth.

New York's continued success - its uncanny knack for renewing itself again and again - is based on the diversity of its industries and its ability to attract the best and brightest across a wide range of fields.